See, this is really informative. Here I was under the impression that being a “tankie” was about approving of authoritarian force (sending in the tanks) in the name of communism, but instead it’s just a question of whether you have a good opinion of the US military machine. The more you know!

folks, is it “tankie behavior” to say “the US military exists to repress people”

Exactly. “They didn’t sign up to harass and repress people” - they joined the US military, so yes, they did. The purpose of a system is what it does.

I heard someone say, “what’s wrong with saying an AI image is ‘by’ the prompt generator, when we accept that Jurassic Park is ‘by’ Stephen Spielberg?”

This was NOT the person’s intended point, but…yeah! The veneration of the Idea at the expense of all else is how we get auteur theory. Which sucks.

To connect this to film for a moment, this is the same mindset that makes people believe in auteur theory. The Guy with The Vision is the one solely responsible for the art. Everyone else involved might as well be a machine executing One Guy’s Vision.

Even her current "shocked by all these violent threats" tweets are using the exact same antisemitic language she's been known for

The thing that stands out to me as a glaring difference between 2020 and now is the role of Twitter/X. At the time, they took down the tweet with the doxxing information and (temporarily) suspended the account responsible. What are the chances that would happen today

Trapped in a conversation with some guy who’s “just passionate about history” but he seems a little *too* into some obscure historical atrocity, and, by the way, he has memorabilia he wants to show you…

I also first read it as a teenager and the way the reveal is executed (the single drop of blood on the page!) has stayed with me for years. Someone please steal that structure and use it for something not horrendously racist.

It’s “The Outsider” for me.

You just mentioned this, but shout-out to Blank Claveringi

And focusing on the art’s quality has material consequences. Not just in distracting from the actual issue or the people X has hurt, but also in convincing people that Good Art is a weight that can counterbalance people’s bad actions and complicate questions of justice, while Bad Art isn’t.

The behavior is unacceptable and whether X made good, bad, or mediocre art has fuck-all to do with the conversation.

Red pandas would never; that's panda slander. Slanpander, if you will

Of course England is in Europe, Doggerland only sunk like 15 minutes ago*

*in geologic time

the terror is the only book in recent memory that I have physically flung with great force (about 50 pages from the end)

it gives you a pretty good sense of who simmons is as a person but the reality is, in fact, worse

I feel like we don't talk enough about the right-wing shift in emphasis from "pro-capital punishment" to "more crimes should be capital" and "there should be fewer barriers (such as due process) to enacting capital punishment"

8. Evil city / pure countryside is an example of what Jeremy Lent calls a “root metaphor”: an idea so deeply implanted in our minds that we don’t even recognise it as an idea.